Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

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This is so true. I've been working on an app for a while now (very part time, mostly scratching my own itch). A few months ago, I decided to do some thinking about what it would take to make a business out of it.

The very first thing I concluded is that, to make a sustainable business, the app has to be seen as a marketing expense and the actual business needs to be somewhere else. Trying to make it with an app alone, especially in a niche market, is not going to happen.

Games are even worse, because, by their very nature, they are a boom/bust industry. You survive in one of two ways as an indie: making incredible games and marketing the crap out of them or making a lot of OK games to flatten the boom/bust curves. It sounds like these guys want to do the former, which is awesome, but they've fallen for what I call "arrogant developer syndrome", which is simply that they believe "If you build it great, they will come and throw money at you." Marketing is as important to product development as writing software. You can build software without marketing, but you won't build a product.

(As a side note related to said app/business, if you are in any way involved in startups [including wanting to start one someday], I'm trying find that actual business. I've got a very short survey that I could use feedback on: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F7W9P5P )

Well, I wish these guys only suffered from "If you build it great, they will come and throw money at you.".

No!

They suffer from an advanced mutation.

"If you build it great, those guys over there will come and throw money at you. Ewwwwwwww. Green stuff. Let's move over here to these guys. They will come and throw 1-star reviews at us. It's the only thing that can push our limits and make us even greater."

I used to work with a group of developers in the MIT Media Lab who, honestly, were some of the most moral and upstanding individuals I've ever met. They spent a lot of time trying building software to help people in need.

But the one thing that I could never wrap my head around was the fact that they saw money as inherently evil. They went so far as to actively avoid using or accepting money, to the point that it actually hindered their Samaritan efforts.

The more "good" people who see money as evil, the fewer good people who will use it. Which means that a higher proportion of it will go to "evil" people and deeds. Which, in turn, feeds back into the loop to power the false perception that money itself is a bad thing.

It's a Jesus complex and a mental illness. Pity them. They are sick.

People are motivated by different things, and that is neither good or bad. It is.

The upside of people wanting to give their labors away in exchange for recognition or a university paycheck is that it has pushed the rest of us up the value chain. Big companies want to be like IBM in 1970 -- owners of the marketplace, who stick you with whatever makes sense to them. That's why greybeard mainframe types call everything that isn't a mainframe "open systems". IBM, Control Data, etc were (and in some cases are) so restrictive that you literally had to provide their on-site engineers with a private office suite in your facility that your employees were not allowed to enter. (Where the manuals, etc were kept.)

All of this "giving away" of stuff has stopped our society from reinventing the wheel. I can provide motivated people with marginal education and they can produce useful things without a deep understanding of how computers and compiler work. That's powerful stuff.

True believers always come with associated baggage. Whether they want your money, your soul, or something in between, there's always ups and downs.

All of this "giving away" of stuff has stopped our society from reinventing the wheel.

Unfortunately, the people "giving away" spend a lot of time reinventing fantastically-different but only-very-marginally-better wheels. Every week I see on HN about some new language or framework someone has invented that fragments the market even more. If you aren't being compensated in dollars, being compensated with being "the inventor of X" can come close, so there's a big supply of this.

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